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Saturday, March 21, 2015

`Softly Through My Mind'

L.E.
Sissman dedicated his second collection of poems, Scattered Returns (1969), to Howard Moss (1922-1987), the poet,
critic and for almost forty years, poetry editor of The New Yorker. On the dedication page, Sissman includes an
epigraph to the volume, four unsigned, presumably self-penned lines of verse:

“The
highest artist grapples up his art

One-handed;
with the other, reaches out

To those
below him on the slope above

The
anonymous abyss: a grasp of love.”

And with
his third hand, he’s pulled along by the artists who preceded him up the rope of
art. That’s a wise guy way of saying that even the most wayward artist, the
most furiously individual, is just one member of a vast acrobatic team. Perhaps
Sissman numbers Moss, just six years his senior, among the helping hands,
though an unscientific sounding of the literary Zeitgeist suggests Moss has
slipped quietly into the “anonymous abyss.” That’s a humbling reminder to writers
that reputations, even the grandest, evaporate with the morning dew. Sissman’s
isn’t in jeopardy because it hardly condensed in the first place, at least
among influential tastemakers. Dying at age forty-eight didn’t help, though the
cancer that killed him inspired much of his best work. We can thank Danny Heitman for helping to keep Sissman’s work alive. Heitman suggests we fill out
the shelf already occupied by Hello,
Darkness: The Collected Poems of L.E.Sissman
(1978) and Innocent Bystander: The Scene
from the 70’s (1975) with his letters and the uncollected prose (he
reviewed Gravity’s Rainbow for The New Yorker):

“To read Sissman’s work is to wish for more of it. His letters and book
reviews remain uncollected, something an enterprising university press should
try to correct. At the very least, an anthology of his out-of-print writings is
long overdue.”

Heitman cites an essay from Innocent
Bystander, “The Constant Rereader’s Bookshelf,” in which Sissman says “rereading
is, for me, the most satisfying, if not the most profitable, kind of reading.”
Permit me to quibble: no reading is more profitable than rereading. We reread a
writer – in this case, Sissman -- because he has already proven himself. He is
trustworthy. As Sissman says, his “rhythms…move softly through my mind.”